


Chasin' Down a Hoodoo There

by SegaBarrett



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Cajun Cooking, M/M, the beach
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-01
Updated: 2021-02-01
Packaged: 2021-03-12 15:41:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,883
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29137983
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SegaBarrett/pseuds/SegaBarrett
Summary: Benny comes to visit Dean.
Relationships: Benny Lafitte/Dean Winchester
Comments: 4
Kudos: 6
Collections: Chocolate Box - Round 6





	Chasin' Down a Hoodoo There

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kingstoken](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kingstoken/gifts).



> Disclaimer: I don't own Supernatural, and I make no money from this.
> 
> A/N: Title comes from "Born on the Bayou" by CCR.

Dean had expected to stay in Purgatory. It was the same way he had felt when he had arrived in Hell, the sort of finality that set in his chest and allowed him to adapt to every new mind-bending situation that being a Winchester set him on.

Since everything was possible, anxiety was no longer a setting that Dean could reach – he had to accept everything, let it flow over him, and not allow himself to get upset. Otherwise, he would have to be upset about everything in the world, and then he would likely burn up and die.

Which, in retrospect, he might have technically already done.

It was cool and cold – well, Dean would say “as Hell”, but he knew that part wasn’t true. And most surprisingly, Purgatory seemed to always be damp, like some kind of a swamp.

Maybe that was why Benny did so well here. He told Dean that he grew up in a swamp, after all. The darkness and dampness suited him well.

Even though he wanted to get out. 

They always talked about getting out – but they always talked about it afterwards. After Benny’s teeth slid along Dean’s neck as if he was taunting him just a little bit. After Dean would wrap his arms around Benny and squeeze him tightly – because nothing ever seemed to stay put for Dean in his entire life.

And then they had gotten out. Benny had hitched a ride under Dean’s skin and it had felt right in ways that it shouldn’t have.

Because anything that felt that good for Dean; well, it always came with a price.

***

Dean had told Benny not to call him unless he needed him. He hadn’t thought that maybe it could turn out to be the other way around.

He started to feel alone – even when he was talking to Sam, or even when he was in a crowded bar, even when he was around other hunters. Every time that he closed his eyes, it felt as if he was trying to sleep on a boat that kept rocking back and forth and would never allow him to completely get his footing.

And so he called Benny first.

And Benny came running.

***

Despite the fact that Sam didn’t trust Benny very much at all, he had been patient enough to make himself scarce for a day – “looking into a case with Cas, might be nothing, might be creepy clowns” was the excuse that he gave – to give Dean and Benny the whole day of Benny’s arrival to “catch up”, whatever that meant exactly.

Sam and Dean had been staying at a motel down at the shore in Wildwood, New Jersey, and even in the moonlight, Benny looked out of place as he approached Dean on the beach.

Dean had been sitting there since Sam’s hasty retreat, his feet sunk into the sand as he watched Benny’s form against the night sky.

“You want to play some beach ball?” Dean inquired, cocking his head to the side as Benny sat awkwardly beside him.

“I can’t say that’s something I’ve ever done before, Dean,” Benny replied with a small smile. “It feels awfully sunny out these parts, even at night. Doesn’t it?”

“Maybe,” Dean replied, “I’m not sure if things have been sunny for me for a pretty long time. But look at the moon. It’s kinda nice.”

Benny snorted.

“Dean Winchester, waxing poetic about the moon. You been out here too long. Let’s get you inside and let’s make the most of this before your brother comes in and, what’d you call it?”

“Cockblocks us?” Dean supplied.

“I can’t say that I’m… familiar with the nomenclature, but the idea sounds about right,” Benny said. “You’re a little pale.”

“Look who’s talking, Dracula,” Dean quipped. 

“You need a good meal.”

“I’ll have you know that I eat very well. All the time. In every city we visit.”

“Do you care to enlighten me on what it is you’ve been eating then, Dean?”

“Burgers,” Dean said, “Plenty of burgers. The best burgers in every city, state, and commonwealth in our great country.”

Benny snorted and slowly stood up, brushing stand off of his pants. 

“Let me show you how it’s done.”

***

Benny burst through the supermarket, getting a fair amount of looks but no comments. Dean watched him go, not even entirely sure what he was tossing in his basket but simply relieved it wasn’t one of the people in the 10 Items or Less line who had around twenty items, though Dean couldn’t have blamed him.

“I don’t even recognize half of this,” Dean said as he peeked into the basket. “How do you know you’re getting what you need?”

“Because I’ve been doing this for longer than you’ve been alive. Literally,” Benny told him. He rolled his eyes and crooked his finger. “Come help me put all this on the conveyor belt.” 

Dean chuckled fondly at the way Benny said “conveyor” and helped him scoop groceries on to the belt. It was odd, being around him again. Before, everything that been so cold and they had needed to gravitate towards each other for – well, maybe not heat, but something. Some kind of “knowing” within the cold itself, within the dark.

Now it felt like running into a teacher out in public when you had convinced yourself they lived at school.

After Benny checked out, thankfully without blood-draining incident, he started off for the motel and left Dean running to catch up with him.

“What’s the rush?” Dean asked. “You got eternity after all, don’t you?”

“I do,” Benny replied, “But this jambalaya don’t. I gotta get it prepped and in the slow cooker.”

“Slow cooker?” Dean asked, “Uh, what the hell is that?”

Benny stared him down.

“You’ll be glad that I brought my own in the car. I just need an outlet to plug it in. Then it’ll be ready in about three-and-a-half hours.”

Dean nearly fell over.

“Three-and-a-half hours? We have to wait three-and-a-half hours to eat something? I understand that some of us,” Dean whirled his hand around dramatically, “Are immortal, but some of us are hungry. Why don’t we just go out and try to whatever’s around here? Nifty Fifties. Or… Shoney’s. Is there a Shoney’s around here? I heard they’re good.”

Benny reached up to pat Dean on the shoulder.

“Good things come to those who wait, Dean.” Benny turned on his heels when they made it to the hotel parking lot and he returned with a slow-cooker in his hands, one of them gathering up the unwrapped cord.

Dean hissed as Benny set it up on the counter in the room, plugging it in (in place of the coffee maker) and then beginning to load ingredients inside. 

“Please explain the point to me, Benjamin,” Dean complained.

“If you call me Benjamin again, well then, you aren’t getting any at all,” Benny replied, wagging a wooden spoon at him. Dean blinked, wondering where the hell he had even gotten that from. Had he brought it with him, or had it been in the motel and Dean had just had no idea it was there?

Dean leaned against the wall and watched him work. He stopped on occasion to ask Dean to do some small task – stir something or pour something – but mostly Benny seemed to prefer to work alone, and he appeared to lose himself in his ministrations before he switched the cooker on and turned back to Dean.

“How ever will we find some way to spend three-and-a-half hours?” Benny asked with a small, crooked smile, and Dean shivered.

They had done this – whatever “this” was, a word now being used to describe more things than Dean could really hope to account for – in Purgatory, of course, but…

His thought was cut off by Benny pressing his lips against Dean’s, biting against Dean’s bottom lip ever so gently, scalpel-careful.

“Does it even work like that here?” Dean asked when Benny broke away a moment, and for once he wasn’t even sure exactly what he was asking. The gravity, the mechanics, maybe the weight of it was different now that they had stepped back on to this plane, because everything about the way Benny began to touch him made Dean feel off-kilter in all of the best ways. 

“I’m not sure,” Benny replied, “Time to find out?”

Dean nodded and allowed Benny’s fingers to trace over him, the way they had in Purgatory, the way that Dean had kept himself oriented to all of the ways in which he needed to remain himself – wasn’t that the biggest danger, after all, not losing so much as losing himself, finding himself somehow aboveground but no longer fundamentally Dean.

Something rearranged, or the sides touched in a cosmic game of Operation.

Dean tried to brush away the memories of Purgatory, placed them inside the same locked box in which he put all of the memories of Hell. The box was full to bursting these days.

Dean tilted back his neck, flashing it to Benny as maybe a taunt and maybe a plea. He needed him, needed to feel alive again, needed to feel something or anything again. He had stepped out of Purgatory and there, it seemed, stepped out of his own skin, and he needed Benny to bring it all back again.

Benny’s lips came down on to Dean’s neck, gentle teasing nibbles along his skin and pulling him along; Dean didn’t know quite to where, but he knew that he would come along. He would go wherever Benny led him.

***

The three-and-a-half hours went by more quickly than Dean would have imagined, and if he was being honest, more quickly than he would have liked.

But he was suddenly jolted out of Benny’s teeth being closer to his thighs than he normally would have been into by the smell of chicken and shrimp wafting from the slow cooker.

“I think we need to eat,” Dean whispered, though he didn’t particularly want to move. On the other hand, he was also ravenously hungry. Benny slid back, pressed a kiss to Dean’s lips, and moved back to his masterpiece.

“I think we do, too,” Benny replied, climbing off of him. “You aren’t going to believe your mouth when this hits your lips.”

“All of that sounded incredibly dirty,” Dean said, as he stood up and tried to recover both his sense of balance and his breath. “I’m impressed.”

“You should be,” Benny said, “Now sit down, shut up and eat.”

Dean grinned and pulled up a chair, sitting at the card table he and Sam tended to bring to every motel so that they would have somewhere to eat that wasn’t their beds. 

Benny had brought silverware, real silverware, and Dean ogled at it a moment before grasping a fork and scooping up a piece of Cajun rice to his lips, sniffing it first for a moment.

He had to admit, it smelled amazing.

Maybe the three-and-a-half hours had been worth it after all.

Dean watched as Benny nibbled on a piece of shrimp, and he plotted to ask him to cook something even longer the next time…

They would have to kill that time somehow, after all. And old habits died hard.


End file.
